A Brill Calendar: August 11

Few Leyden Professors were truly interested in the Dutch colonies.

The Academy provided the private companies VOC and WIC with proper supplies of ‘archiaters’ (a physician, apothecary and medical surveyor of barbers and surgeons all in one) and of ministers of the faith. As a source and subject of scholarly knowledge, the tropics became important only after 1816, when the advance of knowledge – particularly in physical science – became a recognized concern of national government and its successive cabinets.

When Leyden celebrated its 70th Lustrum in 1925, Professor Herman Theodoor Colenbrander (1871 – 1945), a specialist in national history, by the way, devoted in his contribution to the ‘Festschrift’ scathing comment to this early colonial lack of interest. This could only change slowly: the great biological mysteries of bacteriology and virology started to unravel after the age of Napoleon.

The history of a university is the history of knowledge. It is seldom that this slow growth of interest, understanding and insight is as strikingly reflected as in the career of Christiaan Eijkman (Nijkerk, Gelderland, August 11 1858 – Utrecht, November 5 1930). His almost accidental discovery of the cause of the tropical disease beri-beri at the end of the 1880s – refuting the idea that an infection should cause this disease – earned the Dutch bacteriologist a Nobel Prize for Medicine almost forty (sic) years later.

The climate components of biological life and its staggering complexity across Planet Earth came slowly to be understood; Mendel’s Laws had to be rediscovered (after 1900) before they could become a new source for progress in the life sciences. The acceleration of the dissemination of scholarly information and knowledge is largely a 20th century phenomenon.